Electrical power conversion devices are well known in the prior art and include power supplies, amplifiers, converters (AC-DC, AC-AC, DC-DC and DC-AC), generators and drives.
Some prior-art supplies are switched forward-converters that depend on transformer turns-ratio to accommodate differing input and output voltage in which energy stored in an inductive field is a mere by-product of operation.
Other very common power converters related to the present disclosure are switched supplies operating in either the well-known buck or flyback modes. A few supplies such as that of U.S. Pat. No. 6,275,016 are capable of both buck and boost operation. Some flyback supplies are used to provide polarity inversion between input and output.
Sometimes multiple supplies are used to provide bidirectional flow of power, but recently integrated bidirectional supplies have been developed. The supply of U.S. Pat. No. 5,734,258 is bidirectional and operates in both buck and boost modes. U.S. Pat. No. 7,046,525 describes a bidirectional flyback mode supply. U.S. Pat. Nos. 6,894,461 and 5,196,995 describe bidirectional supplies.
Some supplies like U.S. Pat. No. 6,894,461 have a plurality of energy ports.
Less common are switched mode amplifiers with inductive energy-storage elements. The amplifier of U.S. Pat. No. 4,186,437 uses a plurality of inductors to obtain bipolar operation. The amplifier of U.S. Pat. No. 7,030,694 uses a plurality of DC-DC converters, complementarily controlled, to achieve bipolar operation.
The power converter of U.S. Pat. No. 5,196,995 is bidirectional and bipolar, but is bidirectional only when inverting polarity.
It is not known in the prior art to provide an integrated switched-mode power-converter that is bidirectionally bipolar.